Two-time Academy Award winner Jodie Foster puts the adult-themed angst away for Nim’s Island, a family friendly film in which she shows off her comedy chops, playing an agoraphobic author who must finally leave the house to come to the aid of her IM buddy, a plucky island-bound girl (Abigail Breslin) whose researcher dad has gone missing.
Foster opens up on working with a freshly-minted child star after her own long tour of duty in Hollywood, the price of growing up famous, the actors that blow even her away and why you just shouldn’t mess with her towels.
Hollywood.com: What was it like working with Abigail Breslin, who started acting at about the same age you did?
Jodie Foster: Abigail is great. Because I was a child actor from the time I was 3, I do see bits and pieces of myself as a kid in her. She’s got a great family that comes with her. She’s very well-adjusted and she likes to just get on with it and likes to just do her job and not dwell on the acting stuff. She has something that I didn’t have as a young person, which is she has this kind of very strong access to her emotions. That’s so easy for her and she’s really just born to be an actress. I really didn’t have that at her age, and so it’s fun for me to see that, to look at a kid and go, ‘Wow, that kid is born to be an actor.’ [PAGEBREAK]
HW: Did you talk to her about her possibly having a career as long-lived as yours?
JF: Not really. She wasn’t looking for advice from me. Our conversations were more about what flavor of popsicles do you like. [laughs] We were talking about the ice cream trucks in New York and what things they have and how the Sponge Bob one is a rip. It’s like, ‘It’s all yellow, but there’s nothing else on it.’ So we didn’t really talk about careers and stuff. She also doesn’t need my advice. She’s got a great career and she’s happy and healthy and all of that. I’ll tell you what was amazing. It was watching Abigail change from the beginning of the film to the end. She’s a Manhattan kid, raised in Manhattan. She didn’t do a lot of camping and stuff like that in her life. She’s a city kid. She’d never swam in the ocean before. She had put her toe in the ocean or maybe her hand in the ocean, but she’d never fully swam in the ocean before. Here she had to jump on the back of a sea lion, a trained sea lion and go underneath the water and above the water and underneath the water. That was really adventurous stuff. Also climbing rock faces and going on the zip line. She was actually a little bit afraid of heights and she had to do that zip line thing. At the beginning when we started rehearsals she was a little scared of stuff. By the end though she was diving into the waves and she had a little rabbits nest in hair and she changed, I think. It really brought her confidence in a way that was good, and that’s what kids are looking for from these adventure stories. They’re looking to be able to say, ‘I could do that myself. I can fix a satellite dish with a toolbox and I can make my own food. If my dad was away for two days I would figure it out.’ It’s important for kids to have that kind of confidence in their own self-reliance. [PAGEBREAK]
HW: What’s the difference do you think between being a child actor now and one when you were growing up?
JF: There are so many differences. A child actor now, I don’t know, but definitely [for] an adolescent actor and a post-adolescent actor, for sure. That’s a whole different world now than it ever was before with the intrusions and the visibility and being paid so much. We didn’t have that. All of those things impact on your emotional well-being, on your health and it’s much harder to be a healthy young actor now than it was when I was young.
HW: What are the things that a young performer and their families should remember to follow more of a path that you had instead of some of the other pitfalls?
JF: I really don’t know. So much of it is just who you were born as, your kind of character as it were. I mean, adolescence is a terrible time for everybody. It’s an impossible time for anyone to navigate in any profession, certainly, but even in high school it’s an impossible time to navigate and potentially to do that in front of millions of people is cruel [laughs]. It’s hard. It was hard on me. I’m not saying that it wasn’t hard on me. It was hard. We all know what the pitfalls are and there is also a price to pay for navigating it successfully. The way that you have to become in order to protect yourself has implications, has an impact on your life.
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HW: What do you mean by that?
JF: Well, people always say, ‘You’re so well adjusted.’ I’m like, ‘I’m nutty as a fruitcake. Did you not know that?’ There’s no way that I could have been raised with the series of events that I’ve been raised with and not be affected by it, not be affected in some ways – whether that’s phobias or whatever. But you come up with a methodology to protect yourself and my way is to compartmentalize. So I work from 9 to 5 and my job one day might be acting and emotion and another day it might be putting on makeup and wearing fancy clothes and another day it might be talking about myself all day and that’s just my job because at 5 when I come home I put that away. That’s not who I am. I have to designate a real difference between my personal life and my professional life. That’s not so easy for a lot of people to do. How do you compartmentalize your emotions? There’s a real impact from that which makes me as nutty as a fruitcake.
HW: Have your kids shown any interest in acting and is that something that you’d encourage?
JF: Well, I know I don’t believe I’d promote it at all. I’m trying to avoid the question. Every once in a while my older son will say, ‘I want to be on TV.’ I go, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ But I try to get them interested in the technical sides of making movies, about how things are made and how does CGI work and whatever blue screen. I’d like them to be interested in the behind the scenes, because to me that’s the real world that I live in, being with a crew of 125 people and really making a story come alive through your particular talent and your particular skill. I’d be scared of them being actors. [PAGEBREAK]
HW: There was a time that you were waiting several years between projects. Have you picked up the pace again and if so why is that?
JF: No. I think that I’ll definitely wait several years now. I go through phases. I did go through a phase where I was just sick of it and I was burnt out and I just didn’t find anything interesting or funny because I wasn’t ready to go there yet and when I did I knew it was time for me to go back to work. I think that’s the way to approach it, which is if it moves you there’s a reason and if it doesn’t move you stay away from it because you’re going to be bad.
HW: Your character in Nim’s Island has an abundance of quirks. In real life, what are yours?
JF: I have a lot of those things. I have a lot of anal habits. I squeegee my shower every single time I take it. I’m like just a dictator about my cappuccino maker. No one else is allowed to touch it because they don’t clean it up properly. I have things like that, I guess. I like my towels folded in thirds. All my towels have to be folded in thirds and when the kids don’t I’m like, ‘Well, use your own towels! These are my towels.’ [PAGEBREAK]
HW: Is there anyone out there that you haven’t worked with that you’d like to work with?
JF: Oh, I’ve never worked with Meryl Streep and that just kills me. Meryl Streep or Daniel Day Lewis or Sean Penn. All three of them go beyond anything that I know as acting. There’s really a transcendent connection with the character that they have. It doesn’t make them smarter than anyone else, but it just means that they have a skill that is miraculous.
HW: What actress did you admire most when you were younger?
JF: I liked Katharine Hepburn a lot because I just had this idea that somehow that’s how I wanted to be when I was her age and I loved the movies that she made as a younger person. I kind of saw myself like that. She wasn’t some beauty queen or something, but she was witty and bright and self-determined and she had all these different layers of emotion and some of them were the stoic side, the side that was covering up, and I liked that about her.
